Student Cluster Competition

Teams are composed of six students, an advisor, and vendor partners. The advisor provides guidance and recommendations, the vendor provides the resources (hardware and software), and the students provide the skill and enthusiasm. Students work with their advisors to craft a proposal that describes the team, the suggested hardware, and their approach to the competition. The SCC committee reviews each proposal and provides comments for all submissions. The requirements for teams are described more completely below.

The hardware requirements for team clusters are that they are able to run the competition’s applications and exercises and that they can operate without exceeding an announced power limit. This year the competition includes a dynamic power limit – at times the power available to each team for their competition hardware may be as high as 4000-watts (but will usually be lower) and may be as low as 1500-watts (but will usually be higher). Hardware requirements are described more completely in the “SCC Rules” (Available Summer 2023).

Selected teams receive full conference registration for each team member and one advisor. Each team is also provided with seven single-occupancy hotel rooms for the students and advisor. As the competition is part of the Students@SC program, students can also participate in Mentor–Protégé Matching and the Job Fair. Travel to the conference and per diem are not provided.

One of the applications presented to the student teams is the Reproducibility Challenge, in which students attempt to reproduce results from an accepted paper from the prior year’s Technical Program.

Students have the opportunity to interact directly with the paper’s authors as they attempt to reproduce specific results and conclusions from the paper. As part of this challenge, each student team writes a reproducibility report detailing their experience in reproducing the results from the paper. Authors of the most highly rated reproducibility reports may be invited to submit their reports to a reproducibility special issue.